Profit Sourcery

By Lauren Carter

Top 5 Tips to Make Money on Amazon

Selling on Amazon is an easy way to run an online business but that doesn’t mean it requires no work or effort. With more and more people selling on Amazon every year you need to stay one step ahead of the crowd to really make the most of it. Here are some tips to make sure you are getting the best out of your Amazon seller account.

1. Add a browse node to make sure your products are visible in the right place

One mistake many Amazon sellers make is assuming the existing listing they are adding to is correct and accurate. While this is true for the majority of the listing there are some changes you can make quickly and easily which could make a huge difference to the visibility of your listing.

Say, for example, you are selling a chocolate fountain, you might assume that the person who created the listing has placed the product in the correct sub-category. However, you have no way of checking this and if they haven’t done so your product won’t show up when a customer clicks on the Chocolate Fountains sub-category to narrow down their search. Adding a browse node (sub-category) yourself takes a couple of minutes and could make your product visible to so many more customers, there’s really no question about whether it is worth doing.

Through your Amazon inventory you can choose to “edit details” for each of your existing listings. On the “Vital Info” tab you will see a “Recommended Browse Nodes” section; here you can select which sub-category your product falls into

2. Include keywords to make your products visible in more search results

The second way you can edit an existing listing is by adding keywords. On the “Edit details” page there is a keywords tab where you have 250 characters. Amazon already counts all the words in the title and description as keywords and repeating them here won’t give them any extra weighting so don’t bother!

Take some time to do some keyword research, it doesn’t take long and if you can work out what people are searching for on Amazon already you can make your product visible to more potential customers.

Keyword research is easy to do on Amazon: if you type an obvious keyword into the search bar you will see a list of suggestions appear which show you the related searches other people have made. Add these extras as your keywords and then type another variation into the search bar for more suggestions.

Top Tip: Think about the context in which you would use the product and what you might put into the search bar to find your product. There is no reason to add common misspellings of words, Amazon picks those up for you already.

3. Use a repricer to keep your offers competitive

If you’ve been selling on Amazon for a while you will know how important it is to win the Buy Box. In short, if you’re competing against a number of other sellers on the same listing you want your offer to be the very best one so that you get the sales over your competitors. Prices on Amazon go up and down all the time and you need to make sure you are offering the right price all the time.

There are several different Repricing solutions available to Amazon sellers. These programmes allow you to set minimum and maximum prices for every product you sell, the software will then monitor your price and your competitor’s price to make sure you are offering the right price to customers.

Amazon offers great value to their customers, that’s no secret. Trying to beat Amazon on price is quite often a total waste of time and effort; you’re likely to end up with no profit margin and still they will be able to beat you on price. So what do you do? Does that mean you shouldn’t ever buy something that Amazon stocks?

Well, there is a way to compete with Amazon without starting a race to the bottom and to do this you’ll need to install the keepa.com browser add-on. This add-on will display a graph within each Amazon listing, showing the price changes over time as well as the sales rank. The price is shown as three separate lines on the graph: one for marketplace sellers, one for used items and one for Amazon themselves if they stock the product.

You can use this to check how frequently Amazon run out of stock for this product by checking breaks in the price line. When Amazon is out of stock you can swoop in and offer your product at your own price and steal the sales for that period. If you know that for the last 3 years Amazon have sold out of a popular toy two weeks before Christmas and the price for third party sellers has sky rocketed, you can stock up ready to be the one to save Christmas for all those parents desperate to give little Timmy the perfect holiday season!

5. Use historical data trackers

While we’re on the subject of Keepa, it’s an invaluable resource for Amazon sellers alongside CamelCamelCamel.com and other Amazon price trackers. Imagine you’re looking to buy a stock line and you can see it’s selling for double your cost price at the moment. You’ve struck gold and you buy 50. Next week your listing is active and you notice the price has halved. You can’t compete and make a profit – you’ve lost your golden goose.

Checking the price history for the product will let you see if the price is typical for the product or if it is unusually high at the moment. There are a million reasons the current price might be unusual, you can’t predict other people’s pricing strategies. If you check the price history you can see what the product usually sells for and if you can’t make a profit at that price then it’s probably best you avoid it.

You can also use price history to price your products tactically. You might notice that during an upcoming season your product’s price increases. Unless you need to get some profit back straight away for some reason it is well worth holding out at a higher price. Without checking price history for your products you have no way of predicting the market and you could be missing out on profit by jumping in too soon.

The basics of how to sell on Amazon are so simple, it is well worth doing some research and putting in the extra time to really maximise your profit and get the most out of your Amazon business. Let us know what you think of these tips and how you make the most of your Amazon account on Twitter @profitsourcery or facebook.com/profitsourcery

Natalie Poynton

Hi Lauren,

know this is probably the completely wrong person to talk about this subject with, but I have seen an advert online for a Digital Marketing executive. I am recruiting in Cardiff and Newport for exactly the same role. We have some really experienced candidates and some graduate level ones too, all with at least 4 years experience, some with 15 years. I would love to contact the person who is dealing with this.